A Crash Course in CRAC Units - Data Center Cooling

In the past few weeks, we've fielded a few questions from our Twitter followers about temperatures in our data center and how CRAC units work. John mentioned in the "Building a Data Center" series that his next post would be about keeping the data center cool, so I'll try not to steal too much thunder from him by posting a basic CRAC unit explanation to answer those questions.

To record this video, we made the long walk (~2 minutes) downstairs to Pod 1 of SoftLayer's DAL05 facility to give you a first-hand look at the star of the show: the DC Computer Room Air Conditioning Unit. Because this was recorded on a "Truck Day" at SoftLayer, the pod was bustling with activity, so we found a "quiet" open area in a section of the pod that will soon be filled with new servers to record the video.

Due to the ambient noise in the data center, my explanation had to be "yelled," so please forgive the volume.